Posts by: Ari Messer

Right now New York is calm, and this of course feels eerie. It’s a good time to catch the last weekend of Today’s Weather at Sit and Read in Williamsburg. Zero1 Magazine just ran my catalog essay for the exhibition.

The gallery recently posted an awesome time-lapse video of the artists at work and a free PDF version of the haunting little book that goes along with the show, which features Ian Campbell and David Muenzer’s “improved” vintage oil paintings and found Polaroids.

Know who’s now on Twitter? Arthur Miller, Sylvia Plath, the BFG, and even Behemoth, the black cat from The Master and Margarita. It’s all a part of Reorbit, a “reanimation of historical and literary figures.”

In a special visual edition of the Generation Gap column, renowned Rumpus illustrator Jason Novak and I team up to bring you a tale on the very edge of natural history, a story about haunted 18th-century illustrator of bug and bird, Eleazar Albin.

“Welcome to the only dating site that lists real people, sincerely posting their real data and picture. You’ll feel comfortable watching them. Just like in Facebook.”

To construct Lovely Faces, the third column in their phenomenal Hacking Monopolism Trilogy, which began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico borrowed info from one million Facebook profiles, then ran the pics through face-recognition software.

Why is the second person such a natural and addictive tense–perhaps the only honest one–when writing about drug abuse and a foggy recovery?

For years, you haven’t been able to stop asking this question. Reading Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, you are asking it again, vocally (a real dinner-party silencer), by mistake or with motivations hidden from even yourself.

In yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, I chat with artist Eric Drooker about animating Allen Ginsberg’s Howl for the film of the same name as the long poem, and his resulting new book, Howl: A Graphic Novel.

One thing that was edited out of my piece was this sentence: “Howl: A Graphic Novel reads like a panoramic urban altar, demanding something deeper than just the reader’s attention.” Maybe readers are afraid of sacrifice?

There are geeks, there are music geeks, and then there are the chordal crusaders, the modal moradeurs. In their own words, “powerambient” band Chord summons the feeling “of a single note being rendered into an unsolvable riddle–a harmonic Gordian knot that creates an almost pastoral feel of being blinded by the sun.”

At Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room on Sunday, Chord brings their singular sound to a phenomenal Important Records showcase, which includes everybody from folky Arborea to the microtonal Duane Pitre.

The only literary event more cloying than a boring reading is a networking event without alcohol. The Faster Times, “a new type of newspaper for a new type of world,” is out to remedy this situation in the same way they’ve been smartly remedying sickened news models.

In three different rooms on two coasts, artist Darren Almond is practicing visual alchemy.

One thing he does is take long exposures on full moons in ridiculously remote locations. Another thing he does is capture time itself. The still above comes from one of his two Sometimes Still projects currently showing at Matthew Marks in New York.

Great Britain is making its own lists. And Great Britain is still publishing novels.

If you believe the rumors, the raging historical narratives are printed by hand, folded into folios, carried from London’s dust into the countryside in the talons of birds that never made it across the Atlantic, placed on a round table in the middle of Sherwood Forest, then torn open by the teeth of hunting dogs.

“This show is an act of complete personal indulgence. When the good people at apexart approached me about curating something in their space, they made a huge mistake. After some polite back and forth, Steven Rand said to me directly, ‘We’d like you to do something that reflects your passion.’ I responded, ‘Well, football or what you call soccer is my passion.

I was on my way to Book Expo America on Tuesday when the C train, still in Brooklyn, experienced a preposterously long delay–even for the C train. At first we were told simply that a “situation” was being “investigated” at “another station.”

The often-thrilling little outfit has been playing around lately with Linus Bill, a photographer who has taken to silkscreening because, he tells Interview, “Until I made those silkscreens, I was never satisfied with how my work looked as prints….With the silkscreens, you really work with color.

I was actually glad to hear “Animal” on the new 90210 last week. The second most luscious (“Sans Soleil” wins that prize) and first most catchy track on Miike Snow‘s self-titled 2009 debut, fit perfectly with the elevated high school moment.

Allen Ginsberg claimed that his reading voice was an imitation of the voice with which William Blake spoke to him in his visions and dreams. Once you hear Ginsberg read, you are stuck in his dream forever.

Javier Marias, the prolific Spanish author who blends wit and private conspiracies in unparalleled ways, was on KCRW’s Bookworm yesterday.

Larry Sultan is dead. The photographer behind Pictures from Home passed away from cancer on Sunday at the age of 63. The SF Chron, NY Times, and LA Times have similar obits. In 1990, Catherine Liu (yes, that Catherine Liu) talked to Sultan for BOMB about his home movies project; in the interview, Sultan says: “I want to measure how a life was lived against how a life was dreamed.”

The 2009 music release schedule is winding down, so people have started making their arbitrary top-whatever lists.

While such rankings might be more potent some years from now, when we see which albums are actually still in rotation (like tomorrow’s Leonids meteor shower, where “trails laid down by the [meteor’s parent] comet in 1466 and 1533 are expected to be the chief contributors to whatever happens”), some late-season releases and tours guarantee that this presidentially revolutionary year will be known as the year of the resurrected voice.

Writer and artist Alasdair Gray is his own best nightmare. It took the modern Scottish bard twenty-five years to finish Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), his fat, strangely inspirational novel of urbanism gone awry.

Sometimes, in the work of German-Danish artist Christian Lemmerz, a “child’s christening is symbolised with a baptismal font in white marble with the inside shaped as a baby coffin….[A] wet grave filled with Kölner Wasser, to dampen the stench.”

In “Corpus Delicti” at the Copenhagen branch of Gallery Faurschou, the lifesource is in the details.

Established by artist David Buckland in 2001, Cape Farewell coordinates cultural responses to climate change. One dope thing they do is send groups of artists, musicians, educators, writers, and scientists into the arctic–not forever, just for a trip. Past expeditions have included Feist, Amy Balkin, Vikram Seth, Jarvis Cocker, and Gary Hume, creator of the Hermaphrodite Polar Bear, below.

Rumpus contributing editor Ari Messer was a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Bay Guardian from 2006-2010.
Here is his web life.

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